8 Chrome extensions to bolster your productivity

Chrome is king when it comes to Internet browsers, commanding close to 60 percent of the market. Safari comes in second, and the once-dominant IE is now trailing in third place.

Chrome – part of Google’s product portfolio – is a fast, secure, easy to use, and highly customisable browser.

When signed in, your bookmarks and browsing history come with you. The Chrome Store packs a huge collection of apps and extensions, with the latter sitting nicely next to the address bar for fast access.

Extensions are nifty little tools that can perform a range of tasks, from sharing blog posts on your social networks to saving web pages and storing your passwords – and more. Extensions can save you tons of time and are super convenient if you use them right. The trick is to avoid extension overload – you can easily gauge this by the size of your address bar.

These are eight Chrome extensions I can’t live without…

Pocket

The best way to save all your favourite web content for later — articles, videos and more. The Chrome extension will sync your content automatically across your devices — phone, tablet, and computer — so you can view it at any time, even without an internet connection.

Features:

One-click saving of any page with the toolbar button or keyboard shortcut

Right-click menu item to save any link, no need to load the page first

Evernote Web Clipper

Perhaps my favourite extension of all. It’s kind of similar to Pocket, but more powerful. EWC lets you clip the web pages you want to keep and save them in Evernote.

Features:

Clip any article or web page, add to a specific notebook and assign tags

Highlight key text from any website or article

Clip Gmail threads and attachments

Clip as entire page, selection, or simplified article

Pushbullet

With Pushbullet you can conveniently send and receive SMS messages from your computer (requires Android), and reply to messages from many popular apps including WhatsApp, Kik, and Facebook Messenger.Features:

Easily share links and files between your devices, or with friends

See all of your phone’s notifications on your computer, including phone calls

Protect your notifications and SMS with end-to-end encryption

LastPass

LastPass saves your passwords and gives you secure access from every computer and mobile device. Only remember one password — your LastPass master password. Save all your usernames and passwords to LastPass, and it will auto-login to your sites and sync your passwords everywhere you need them.

Use the LastPass security check to review your passwords and flag weak and duplicate passwords

LastPass Password Manager uses AES 256bit encryption implemented with PBKDF2 encryption keys and salted hashing. All sensitive user data is encrypted and decrypted locally on the user’s machine, so that only encrypted sensitive information is ever synced with LastPass.AuthyMakes two-factor authentication a truly seamless experience and brings the power and security of strong authentication to users everywhere, anywhere.

Features:

Cloud backup — use Authy from any smartphone, tablet, desktop, and wearabl

Add and synchronize multiple devices for convenient access and redundancy

Capture Webpage ScreenshotCapture full webpage screenshots, edit and save them to PDF/JPEG/GIF/PNG/BMP; upload, print, send to Photoshop, clipboard or email.Features:

Capture full web pages entirely

Capture only visible part of the page

Capture selection

Save screenshot to disk as PDF, PNG, and JPEG

Google CalendarEasily check Google Calendar and add new events from websites you visit. Get a button on your browser toolbar that you can easily click to see upcoming events from Google Calendar, without ever leaving your page. And if you’re on sites that have special events encoded, you can click the button to instantly add events to your calendar. The button shows an orange plus sign whenever there are events on the page you’re viewing that can be added to your calendar.

Features:

Displays event from your selected calendars

Quick Add: When adding events, you no longer need to specify a time separately Shows events from whatever calendars you are logged in within Chrome

ColorZilla (American spelling)ColorZilla is an advanced eyedropper, colour picker, gradient generator and more. With ColourZilla you can get a colour reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust the colour and paste it into another program.Features:

Chrome is undoubtedly the best web browser available. Its robust security, flexibility and user-friendliness place it miles ahead of the competition. It’s also gaining more respect in the enterprise market, bringing group policy options that will please even the most paranoid organisations. While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer once held the crown and its newer Edge offering is a huge improvement, Chrome (I believe) will dominate for a long time to come.